President Biden and European leaders say they cannot push Ukraine and Russia into negotiations, though some U.S. lawmakers are questioning aid for an open-ended war.
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Ukrainian soldiers ride atop an armored vehicle. President Biden and European leaders are hard-pressed to describe a plausible endgame to the conflict that would be acceptable to both sides.
WASHINGTON — American and European officials say serious peace talks between Ukraine and Russia are unlikely in the near future, even as the Biden administration tries to fend off growing questions from some members of Congress about the U.S. government’s open-ended investment in the war.
Russian and Ukrainian officials have made separate public comments in recent days about potential peace negotiations, more than six months after their last known direct talks fell apart. But U.S. officials say that they do not believe talks will begin soon and that both sides think continued fighting, for now, will strengthen their eventual negotiating positions.
They also concede that it is difficult to envision terms of a settlement that Ukraine and Russia would accept.
Ukrainian officials are optimistic about their military prospects after making unexpectedly large gains this fall. Their morale soared again on Wednesday, when Russia ordered its forces to retreat from the southern city of Kherson.
Perhaps more important, American and European officials say, Ukraine’s population has been hardened by Russia’s devastating military campaign, which has destroyed civilian areas and resulted in massacres, rape and looting. Even if Ukrainian leaders were prepared to make concessions to bring the fighting to an end, their people are not disposed to accept that, the officials say.
American officials say Russia’s recent attacks on critical infrastructure have made negotiations less likely by eroding any public support for compromise.
And while President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has endured repeated military losses and retreats, officials say he believes that the United States and Europe — as they grapple with soaring energy prices, fears of nuclear escalation and political instability — could lose their will to continue supporting Ukraine at current levels.
After his military’s apparent embarrassment in Kherson, Mr. Putin is less likely to pursue peace than to redouble his efforts to pressure Kyiv and the West. Western officials see events this fall such as the suspected sabotage of Germany’s rail system and drone surveillance over Norway’s offshore oil platforms as possible harbingers of greater Russian disruptions.
More than eight months after Russia’s invasion, U.S. and European officials are hard-pressed to describe a plausible endgame to the conflict that would be acceptable to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and to Mr. Putin, who has long been obsessed with the country.
President Biden said Wednesday that it was the Ukrainians who would ultimately decide their country’s end state. “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said. The White House has committed to not negotiating anything about Ukraine’s future without Kyiv’s representatives present.
The State of the War
- Retreat From Kherson: The Kremlin announced a retreat of Russian forces from the strategically important city in southern Ukraine, one of the most significant reversals of President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort.
- Aerial War Heats Up: As the battle above Ukraine escalates, Ukrainian officials are celebrating the arrival of advanced Western air-defense systems but claim Russia is buying new long-range weapons from Iran.
- Sticking by Ukraine: Despite inflation and anxiety over nuclear weapons, European governments across the ideological spectrum are maintaining support for Ukraine and tough sanctions on Russia.
- Infrastructure Attacks: As they struggle to maintain an electricity grid heavily damaged by Russian missiles, officials in Kyiv say they have begun planning for a once unthinkable possibility: a complete blackout that would force the evacuation of the Ukrainian capital.
But Mr. Biden faces growing pressure from some quarters of Congress. As the war grinds on, House Republicans say they plan to intensify scrutiny of U.S. aid to Ukraine, especially humanitarian assistance.
And some advocates of negotiations say that talks should begin to at least explore possibilities for common ground. Last month, 30 progressive House Democrats sent — then quickly withdrew under political pressure — a letter to Mr. Biden calling for “redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a cease-fire.”
“The issue is not whether you can see an overlap in their positions on a Venn diagram right now, or that we see Russia pre-emptively prepared to make concessions,” said Samuel Charap, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. “It’s that there’s a value to having open channels to lay the groundwork for the future. Talking and fighting at the same time has often been the norm in conflict situations.”
But U.S. officials and analysts warn that Mr. Putin often uses diplomacy as a tool to buy time and divide his enemies.
“It’s understandable that people in the West are shaken by the prospect that this horrible war could drag on for months, if not years,” said Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the co-author of “Accidental Czar,” a new graphic novel-style biography of Mr. Putin. “But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that the Russians have ever negotiated in good faith about Ukraine.”
“Their track record since the war started in 2014 has been pretty consistently focused on a mix of playing for time and trying to plant wedges between the U.S. and Europeans, on the one hand, and the U.S. and the Ukrainians, on the other,” Mr. Weiss added, referring to the Russian military’s occupation of the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine and aggression in the country’s eastern Donbas area that began that year.
ImageA captured Russian T-62 tank recovered in the Kherson region. After his military’s apparent embarrassment in Kherson, Mr. Putin is less likely to sue for peace than to redouble his efforts to pressure Kyiv and the West.Credit…Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
The State Department spokesman, Ned Price, struck a similar note on Tuesday. “We’ve seen nothing to indicate that the Russians are at the present moment willing to engage in good faith negotiations,” he told reporters, adding that Moscow could demonstrate sincerity by halting attacks on civilian targets.
The Biden administration increasingly finds itself having to walk a fine line in balancing messages to Ukrainian and American audiences. On the one hand, President Biden has sought to reassure Ukraine that U.S. support remains strong. On the other hand, he has been pressed to explain how a war he has said could lead to “Armageddon” might end.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said during a visit to Ukraine last Friday that U.S. support for Ukraine would be “unwavering and unflinching” — offering reassurance regardless of any disquiet in Congress.
“We fully intend to ensure that the resources are there as necessary and that we’ll get votes from both sides of the aisle to make that happen,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters in Kyiv, the capital, where he met with Mr. Zelensky.
Mr. Sullivan asked Mr. Zelensky about his ideas about “a just peace,” not to pressure the Ukrainian government but to get a better sense of what the end of the war might look like from a Ukrainian perspective, a Biden administration official said.
“A just peace” was a phrase used in an Oct. 11 statement by the Group of 7 nations broadly outlining terms for a potential settlement, including Ukraine’s right to “regain full control of its territory within its internationally recognized borders”; reconstruction of its country, potentially with funds from Russia; and “accountability” for Russian war crimes.
In his nightly address to his country on Monday, Mr. Zelensky listed those same conditions. Some analysts noted that Mr. Zelensky did not repeat his prior refusal to negotiate with a Russian government led by Mr. Putin.
Russian officials have insisted that they are willing to talk and have sought to cast Kyiv as the holdout. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Andrei Rudenko, said on Tuesday that Ukraine lacked the “good will” to talk sincerely.
“This is their choice, we have always declared our readiness for such negotiations,” he said — a message that U.S. officials worry could resonate with neutral nations around the world unless clearly countered by Ukrainian leaders.
Wars often last many years. The United States fought in Afghanistan for two decades even after toppling the Taliban government, and the American military has fought multiple wars in Iraq over the decades, each one a continuation of the last. Absent a full withdrawal by one side, peace talks usually begin only when everyone is exhausted or one party sees defeat on the horizon.
Mr. Charap said that in war, “the end state is one that no one envisions being acceptable at the beginning.”
In Ukraine, the fate of Crimea is a particularly thorny question. Ukrainian leaders insist they will retake that peninsula and other land that the Russian military seized in 2014.
Mr. Putin sees Crimea as a territory of great strategic and historical importance. At the same time, Ukraine, the United States and European nations have insisted for years that Crimea’s status is nonnegotiable. Biden administration officials have repeatedly said that one of the main reasons for supporting Ukraine is to defend the core principle that borders cannot be changed by force.
“In terms of the ultimate status of Crimea, that will be something to be negotiated or discussed between the Ukrainians and the Russians, but Crimea is Ukraine,” Colin H. Kahl, the Pentagon’s under secretary for policy, said on Tuesday.
Ukrainian military advances on Crimea, though a distant prospect for now, would stoke concern in Washington about Mr. Putin’s threats to escalate the conflict.
American and European leaders see their goal for now as keeping a protracted war contained to Ukraine and deterring Mr. Putin from using a tactical nuclear warhead or other weapon of mass destruction. Officials debate whether Mr. Putin is bluffing when he hints at using nuclear arms, but some analysts believe that control of Crimea, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, could be a red line for the Russian leader.
American officials have said for months that they are sending private and public messages to the Kremlin to warn of severe consequences if Mr. Putin uses nuclear weapons. Mr. Sullivan has been talking to Nikolai Patrushev, his Russian counterpart, since the beginning of the war to try to avert any misunderstandings around nuclear threats, the Biden administration official said.
“I have known both Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken for years,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, referring to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Mr. Khanna, who was among those who signed the progressives’ letter to Mr. Biden, continued, “I have confidence that they understand the risks of nuclear war and the risks of escalation, and are doing everything they can to stand with Ukraine while minimizing the risks of the conflict escalating.”
American officials said Mr. Zelensky’s private position has been the same as his public one: He wants to see Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory returned, and he is not interested in trading any of it for an end to the war.
Some European officials wonder privately whether that position is tenable, but others voice support for it.
“We hear many careless statements, like saying, ‘It’s not necessary to have absolute territorial integrity, we need to negotiate, we need to go for compromise so that finally we can have peace again,’” Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of Germany, said at a policy forum last month. “I say very clearly: Such demands are naïve, and such naïve strategies already failed in 2014.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
Source: nytimes.com
